


and yet she lived but once

by crossingwinter



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: (More inspired by/splicing of), (not a tragedy tho bc why yes I am a coward), (there will be boning in honor of the ancient greeks who would support boning in all things), Alternate Universe – Greek Mythology, Eros & Psyche, F/M, Mentions of Suicide, Oedipus as well, Orpheus & Euridyce
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-03
Updated: 2018-05-15
Packaged: 2019-05-01 18:19:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 6,733
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14526420
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crossingwinter/pseuds/crossingwinter
Summary: “The lord of the underworld is a liar,” the queen says when she catches Rey following her gaze.  Her voice is hard, and her gaze is angry.  “He stole my son from me.”





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This was supposed to be something I was gonna write for Reylo Week’s Mythology fill, but I clearly didn’t have my act together in time to finish it. 
> 
> Thanks eternally to the wonderful aionimica for helping me get this shitshow even marginally presentable.
> 
> I'm definitely playing it fast and loose with greek mythology. I hope you won't mind the product of that!

Rey was raised on tales of gods and heroes. 

What little girl is not?  The gods are mercurial, and it is best to placate them as best you can.  Only danger can come from catching the eye of a god, and it is a fate better avoided by mere mortals, lest you find yourself destined to become a spider, or a tree, or worse—a mother to a demigod.

Rey always preferred the tales of the heroes to tales of the gods.  Hercules and the twelve trials of Hera.  Perseus who slew the gorgon and freed his love from a fate worse than death. Jason and the Argonauts who sailed at his side to help him claim golden fleece and golden throne.  They were not gods, which made them feel more real, somehow.  Listening to tales of their feats, imagining their strength, their cleverness, their heart made Rey’s days pass more quickly as she mended  broken plowshares or broken looms.

Rey is a queen of broken things—fitting, for one who as broken as she.  She is nobody, left on a hillside to die by parents who did not want her. They will sing no songs of her when she is gone to Hades.  No one will remember her. No one has any reason to.

-

Rey builds her first harp out of a broken loom with strings that, when plucked, sing out of tune.  She leaves an offering on the altar of the god of music and sunlight and prays that she might one day sing his praise with a voice like a lark’s.

She teaches herself music, as she taught herself all things.  She teaches herself because she would sing songs of Hercules and Perseus and Jason, her old favorites, and that, one day, she might sing songs of her own creation.

On quiet, lonely nights she even dared to dream that perhaps someday, someone else would sing her songs too.

If she is to have reason to be remembered, it is through song.  So, she begs the light—let her learn.

-

And she does. 

“Gifted,” they call her, for when she sings, men stop and listen.  Songs of glory and victory that inspire, or lamentations that bring tears to the eyes—Rey sings them all, and she sings them well.  The gods grace her tongue with a knack for words, her lips do homage to the gods and legends that gave her hope as a child.  She makes them greater, and in so doing, makes herself great.

Word of her gift travels so far as Alderaan, and the queen invites her to play in honor of her son. Rey’s heart is in her throat when she arrives at the palace, is given quarters far more luxurious than those she has ever known, and fed.

That evening, she is brought to the queen’s own quarters, not a banquet hall as she had expected. The queen sits alone in her room, staring out over the darkening groves from her window.

“Sing me a song of the glorious dead,” she whispers, and drinks.

So Rey does, singing high and sweet as she plays her lyre and daylight dies outside.  She sings of war and blood, of loves lost, of murder and vengeance, and when she is done, she sits quietly and waits for the queen to speak.

“My son,” she says softly at last, “slew his father.”

Rey’s heart constricts, and her fingers clench around the frame of her lyre.  The queen had bade her sing a song for the glorious dead, but in honor of a kinslayer?  “There are those who would say such a man is cursed by the gods for all eternity for doing a deed so black,” Rey says as carefully as she can.

“And surely he knows such a curse when he went to Hades.”  The queen sounds sad as she takes another sip of her wine, her dark eyes distant.

“How did he die?” Rey asks, not knowing if she means the queen’s husband or her son.

“He gave himself to Hades,” she says at last.  “In killing my husband, he slew himself.  Not with the same stroke, but it was a deed too black for him.” 

The queen does not look at Rey.  Her gaze is distant, remembering, perhaps, or simply mourning, simply aching. 

“So you have me sing for his memory?”  Rey does not understand, but she wishes to.  She has never known a mother’s love, but she suspects that is what she sees in the queen’s eyes when she turns to look at Rey—a mother remembering her son as a boy, or perhaps her dead husband as a young man.  How lonely she looks.  How old and small.

“Sing for the life he should have had, not the one he led—the love he should have known, not the rage and pain in his heart.  Sing for the son I should have raised, not the one I did.”  The queen drinks, and this time, when Rey’s fingers pluck at the harp strings, she sings a dirge so sweet and sad that the queen’s whole body starts to shake with tears.

She puts all of the queen’s heartbreak into her song, and finds she understands the conflict in her heart.  No songs will ever be written in honor of the queen’s son—only tales to revile him and what he has done. 

Rey finds that sad.

-

Rey stays in Alderaan. The queen has taken a liking to her, and Rey sings in her palace every day.  It is a peaceful place, but not a happy one, and Rey feels the ghosts of the queen’s past in the hallways of her palace.  Had her son run through them, laughing, as a boy?  Had her husband kissed her here?  And now she is alone, with both of them dead and gone.

Rey sings for her, and the queen sits quietly, lost in thought, resting her hand in front of her face.  

At first, Rey had thought that the queen was staring at the vineyards and olive groves that stretch out beneath her city.  But after several evenings, she realizes that the queen’s eyes are trained on a bend between two mountains in the distance.

“The lord of the underworld is a liar,” the queen says when she catches Rey following her gaze.  Her voice is hard, and her gaze is angry.  “He stole my son from me.”

“I did not think he was such a god.”  The lord of Hades has never seen so keen on stealing away the lives of the living—at least not in all the songs that Rey had heard her whole life.

“Gods are not as they are in songs,” the queen replies.  “The sun is older, and death is colder.  I named my son for the sun, and yet it was the whisperings of the underworld that won his heart.”

Once she knows that, she finds herself staring too.  Not when she is singing for the queen, but rather when she finds herself on her own. It is a place always in shadow, and one morning, when dawn’s rosy fingers trail across the sky, Rey goes off towards it.

The countryside around the palace is beautiful, and Rey is alone save for farmers that she passes. As the day grows more and more bright, the point between the two mountains seems almost to grow darker in the contrast to the brightening sky. 

The mountains are farther away than they had looked from the palace, and Rey continues on until the sun is high in the sky.  When she reaches the base of the nearer of the two mountains, she begins to climb, the grass fading away to rock and tree, and prickles breaking across her skin as she approaches what she knows to be the place.

She finds a man sitting there beneath a tree, his eyes on a cave that leads down into the ground. There is mist all about them, and Rey pauses, wondering if she is interrupting.

“What’s down there?” she asks the man.  He has blue eyes and a greying beard and when he looks at her there is neither surprise nor trust in his face.

“Hades,” he says simply, before turning his gaze back.  “That is the path to Hades.”

“You guard it?”

“No,” the man says.

“Then why are you here?”

“Why are you here, singer?” he says.  It is not until that moment that Rey realizes that, out of habit, she’d slung her lyre across her back.

“I don’t know,” she says.

“Don’t let the dark call to you,” the man says.  “There’s no coming back from it.”

She thinks of the dead prince, of his mother’s mourning. 

Her mother had never mourned for her like that, and she’d committed no crime as great as murdering a father.

“And what if I go down intent to bring someone back?” 

The man gazes at her.

“Who are you?”

“Rey,” she says.

“Where are you from, Rey.”

“Nowhere.”

“No one’s from nowhere.”

“I am,” she replies firmly. “Who are you?”

“I was Luke.”  His voice is quiet and doleful and Rey stands straighter.

“The queen’s brother?”

“Once.”

“You guard the gate to Hades because of her son, don’t you?”

Luke gives her a sharp look. “Where did you hear that?”

“I’m a singer.  I know how to recognize stories, even when they aren’t being told.”

“Did she send you?  My sister?”

Rey pauses.  The queen does not know she is here.  She does not even know why she is here.

Except that in the curling corner of her mind, the one that is filled with tales of gods and heroes and men, she does.  “She longs for her son,” she says simply.

Luke’s eyes are hard. “This isn’t going to go the way you think.”

Rey doesn’t heed him, and plunges into the dark.

-

The road to Hades is dark, and cold, and for all the songs and stories she has ever known, unlike anything she could have imagined.

-

For Cerberus, she plays a lullaby and he sleeps, letting her slip past.  For Charon she slips a gold coin under her tongue and he ferries her across Styx without a word. 

-

The dead need no light with which to see; they need no air to breathe.  But when Rey plucks at the strings of her lyre and one approaches, she knows that they have ears to hear.

“How do I find your king?” she asks when she finishes her tune. 

“I can take you to him,” the dead man says.  She cannot see him clearly, cannot hear his breath, but his voice is deep, and emotionless.

“Thank you,” she says. He takes hold of her elbow and his fingers are clammy against her skin.  His grip is strong.  She wonders if this is a mistake, if she will remain forever in the grip of death, or if, like Persephone, she will see spring and sunshine again.

“Why are you here?” he asks as they walk.

“A man gave himself to Hades, and his mother would have him return.”

“If he gave himself to Hades, surely he was ready to die.”

“Then I would hear it of his own lips,” she says.  “His mother longs for him.”

“You must be devoted to her if you came so far,” the dead man says.

“She…” Rey pauses, her voice trailing away.  How odd, that the underworld seems to muffle her voice.  This place is not a place for a singer, “loves her son,” she finishes weakly.

“And you?”

“I did not know him.” The dead man says nothing, and Rey hastens to add, “I did not know my own mother, though.  I should have liked for her to bend heaven and earth to have me returned to her.”

“So you do this, the deed of a devoted daughter, or a brave fool—coming to Hades with nothing but a lyre and your own desires.”

“Singers are foolhardy by nature,” she says carefully.  “We wish to see the beauty, even where it cannot exist.”

The dead man rounds on her. “And what beauty do you see in me?”

Her eyes have adjusted to the darkness around her now, and she can see him more clearly now than before. He has a long face, and a serious one. There are no laugh lines around his lips, but his forehead is creased from frowning.  And his eyes—they are deep, and dark, and dead. 

Except no—no they are not. 

They are sad. 

Sadness, pain, anger all buried so deep that she had very nearly missed them.  It changes his face to see him that way.  Suddenly, he is not dead at all.  He is very much alive.  Somehow, inexplicably, alive.

“How can life that grows in darkness and death not be its own form of beauty?” she asks quietly. “You survive, somehow.”

His hand tightens on her arm, and he doesn’t say a word as he continues to lead her on.

There’s something bright in his eyes. 

She wonders, briefly, if it is the glint of tears.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading this and for all your kind and encouraging reviews. They make me feel a lot less nervous about sharing this since I felt so shaky writing the draft. 
> 
> I'm co-modding a [Reylo Charity Anthology](https://reylocharityanthology.tumblr.com/) which just opened sign-ups for writers/artists. Check it out and sign up if you're interested!

_The Lord of the Underworld is a liar,_ Leia had warned her. _He stole my son from me._

 _I did not take what was not ready to be taken,_ Snoke had said evenly from his black throne in his dark hall.

 _Nor did I,_ Rey thinks fiercely.

Behind her walks Ben, the queen’s son, the undead dweller of the land of the dead. His punishment in Hades for taking his father’s life was that he would live eternally—that prize sought by heroes in songs, immortal life, a curse for him as he walks the shades of Hades, wanting nothing more than to die. He had been forbidden the fruit of the dead, though the lord of the underworld had smirked when he’d offered Rey a pomegranate to eat. _That your songs may live forever in death. Isn’t that what you want, singer?  To be remembered?_

If there was beauty in Ben’s survival, there is also agony in it.

 _But I can be generous,_ Snoke had said, looking between Ben and Rey, and the curl of his lips had sent chills up her spine. The curl of his lips, far more than the land of the dead, made Rey uneasy. _We can make a game of it. Do you trust him, faithless father-murderer that he is?_

Ahead of her, she sees only the path back to the light, back to life, stretching on for what seems like eternity into the darkness. In this passageway, damp and echoing, she can only hear her breath.

_I will send Ben to the land of the living with you—he will follow you back to life. But he will only be able to walk behind you. Trust him, trust that he is there with you. If you look back, even for a moment, he must return to me. Can you do that, little singer?_

Her own breath is loud, echoing off the cave walls. Erratic gasps, so unlike the control required for her songs. Is she a singer? Or is she something else. Is Ben behind her? Or has she been deceived.

Ben seemed to want to come with her—so much as a man not quite alive, not quite dead man can think, his eyes expressionless, his face slack. He stepped towards her when she had extended her hand. He wanted life again.

_He has never been alive, foolish girl. He was always dead. His punishment is hardly a punishment, for he exists as he always has done. He has always been mine._

_The lord of the underworld is a liar. He stole my son from me._

Or perhaps it was that he wanted to truly live this time—to live free of dark whispers, to sit beneath the sun for whom he was named, to let a cool breeze tickle his face as he asleep to the song of birds.

She had seen the life in him, before she knew he was Ben. She had seen that in the dark shroud of death, a flickering light that would not, could not die. His hand had been cool under her touch, clammy and weak of pulse as he walked her through the Underworld. His hair had been lank and oily, the scars on his body pale to the point of fading into the rest of his death white skin.

 _What if he is not there?_ She hates the whisper in her head. Is it her own voice, is it Snoke’s? She does not know.

All she knows is that she must not look back. If she looks back, all is lost. She will have failed him, failed herself, failed the heroes and gods she sings of, failed his mother. If she catches a glimpse of him before he returns into the shadow of death, what could she tell the queen, tell the world? The queen’s brother had been counseled not to do this—but to do it anyway and to fail completely?

 _He wanted to come,_ she tells herself. _He wanted to come with me. I saw the light in his eyes. Surely he would have fought, would have made it known if I was being lied to?_

_The lord of the underworld is a liar. He stole my son from me._

Had he turned her son into a liar too, a creature in his own image?

“Do you like songs?” she asks, hating her muffled voice. She sounds small and afraid. It makes her more nervous. She wants to sound strong, confident. She wants him to know that she believes in him. She wants to believe in herself.

He does not reply, but perhaps he was forbidden to reply. He had been silent, after all, while the deal was struck, his gaze subdued, his face withdrawn. _Surviving,_ she thinks. _Let him do more than survive._

“I sang this for your mother,” Rey says, her voice too high, her heart pounding too quickly. “When she mourned for you. She missed you so much.” She had already told him that, but she does not know what else to say. To remind him of his mother is to remind her of his mother, and if she does that, she will find strength again.

So she sings, plucking at her lyre and tries to take comfort in the sound of her own voice, however thin and small it sounds right now compared to its usual rich depth. Had her voice sounded this small when singing for Leia? Had she sounded like a lonely little girl and not a singer of repute?

 _You’re nothing,_ a voice twists in her head. _Your mother was wise to leave you to die. Would you not be better having done so? You could stay with him in the underworld. You could finally know peace. You’d have him still if you’d taken the pomegranate and chosen to remain with him._

Rey sings a little louder. That voice was too sweet to be familiar, too kind to be true. She knows the tales of tricky-tongued Hermes and knows better than to let such doubts into her breast. _I must trust my heart, as I have always done._

But was Ben there?

 _Trust,_ Rey tells herself.

But she had always done her best not to trust. Trust would have killed her when she was a girl, and trust might have killed Ben if she had been played false, if he was not there, abandoned to his fate in the underworld for the rest of time.

Rey’s fingers twitch on her lyre again. She plays again, and again, and again. She can have faith in music. Music will give her the strength to go on, as it always has done. Song without words, for if she thinks too much on words, she will remember every caution she’s ever known—that one cannot enter the underworld twice and expect to come out alive both times.

Up ahead, she sees the darkness begin to fade to grey. How long she has been in Hades, she does not know. Perhaps it is dusk, perhaps it is dawn, or perhaps silver clouds obscure the sun. _It will be easier for him, after being in the dark so long,_ she thinks as she sings, _Let his eyes adjust._

She’ll be able to see him. She’ll be able to speak with him, to feel his breath. His skin will no longer be cold and clammy to her touch—heart’s blood will pound, and Ben will live. He will live, and love, and laugh, and return to his mother who has so longed for him.

_Is he there?_

_Why_ can she not get that little voice out of her head. Every time she thinks she’s vanquished it, it reappears, still quiet, still unwanted. Quiet, and unwanted—as Rey had been as a child. She had survived, as Ben had in death. So too had the voice.

What if she has been played false, a fool. What if he is not there at all, and she can never return to him. If she sees that he isn’t there now, knows the truth, she will be able to go and raise heaven and earth beneath the land, force the lord of the dead to give him to her for it was _he_ who played her false.

“Ben?”

And she glances.

His face is long and sad, and so long as she lives, she will never forget the way his expression falls when he sees her turn back to check if he is there.

“No,” Rey gulps, her head snapping back to face the grey. “No, come, please, please stay,” she begs and breaks into a run because she’s so close—so very close.

When she reaches the land of the living, she turns back.

The blackness is empty. She cannot see him at all—not even a shadow, not even an outline.

Rey falls to her knees, and even her voice abandons her as she breaks out into silent sobs.


	3. Chapter 3

He is dragged back down to the darkness, but Ben has never felt so alive.

Not as a boy, riding his horse hard and fast like his father.

Not as a man, when he’d slain his father, his sword piercing his heart.

Not as a waste, when he’d walked into the darkness for the first time, not looking back.

“She didn’t have faith in you,” he is told when he returns, and he feels cool skin on his face, a large hand, clammy like death. It hadn’t always felt clammy. This is new.

New, because Ben feels alive, though he never truly died. He has felt alive ever since he first heard her speak, and how his heart had thudded violently in his chest when she had sung. _Do you like songs?_ she asked. He hadn’t heard music, though his mother had been so fond of singers and music had always filled her palace. There’d been no music in his ears, in his heart, not until she’d sung for him.

“You were made for death. And here you are, my son of darkness.”

Ben looks up into yellow eyes and broken face and he doesn’t know where he finds the air for the words that spill from his mouth.

“You bargained with her. Now bargain with me. I am not dead yet.”

-

The deal is struck, and he knows it is one he is designed to lose.

Who can steal the hair from the sun’s own horses? They are fierce things, and known to stamp and burn those who approach. Ben may have once been strong, but his muscles have wasted away in death. He may once have been clever, but it has been far too long since he used his mind as his own.

_If they kill me, then I’ll truly be dead. Perhaps that won’t be so bad._

But he’d sooner live.

He’d sooner hear her sing again. She has such a bright voice.

-

_You belong to me._

He’d heard that voice for so long. He’d never understood what it had meant until the day he had slain his father. In his father’s death rattle, the final breath, the forgiving eyes, he heard that voice.

_You belong to me._

That voice is death.

And Ben had not known how to fight it. Perhaps it was too late to fight. Killing his father had broken him, had cursed him, for if there was one thing the gods could not forgive it was the murder of a father. Better then to just end it all than to face whatever torture they had in store for him in the land of the living.

But that was his torment—that he was to live on in death, to breathe stale air, to know eternity, to watch the passage of time and to feel himself grow older, and older, and older, and never die.

Heroes searched for immortality. Ben had longed for death. He was no hero, and the hero’s victory was a sign of his defeat.

He remembers her face though—wide and determined. He remembers the brightness of her eyes, the brightest thing in all of death, and the sound of her voice, the sound of her breath, the sound of her panicked cries of _no_ as she’d fled from him.

_She didn’t have faith in you._

Could he blame her? Who had ever had faith in him? He barely had faith in himself.

And yet he feels alive as he marches up the path, a red-garbed guard at his side. No man can leave Hades alive twice—if he is to truly live, he must never return.

How loudly his heart thuds in his chest?

The sky is dark by the time that he leaves death. But that is to be expected, given his task. He can’t very well do what he needs to do while Helios rides high in the sky.

He sinks to his knees in the dirt at the base of the opening to Hades and frowns.

He sees a lyre lying in the dirt.

-

“Hello there.”

Ben turns and sees an old man. He wears a time-worn brown traveling cloak and stands leaning on a heavy wooden staff. His beard is short, and white, and his eyes a clear blue. What is he doing here, so close to the sun’s stables?

“Are you a singer?” the old man asks, nodding to the lyre that is strapped to Ben’s back.

Ben’s voiceless red-cloaked guard eyes the old man warily.

“No,” Ben confesses.

“That’s an elegant instrument for one who does not sing,” the old man says.

“It’s not mine,” Ben says.

“May I see it?” Ben’s eyes narrow, and the old man laughs. “I won’t steal it, friend. I used to play when I was young.”

Not quite trusting him, Ben hands over the lyre, and the old man plucks at the strings. He tightens several pegs and when he plucks again, the sound is finer.

“Who are you?” Ben asks.

“Just an old man,” the stranger replies.

“A musical old man,” Ben points out.

“And a musicless young one. Are you sure you need to keep this?”

“It’s not mine. I’d like to return it to its owner.”

“Oh?”

“Yes.”

“And who does it belong to?”

 _Rey,_ he wants to say, but instead he says, “Someone who matters to me.” _Someone who brought me back to life. Someone who made me feel alive for the first time._ Life had meant little to him. It had been sad and empty and painful and angry and oh so very lonely.

“They must matter very much, for you to be here with this. What brings you to the sun’s stables?”

“I could ask the same of you, old man. This is hardly a place for a vagabond.”

The old man chuckles, his gnarled hands tightening on his staff. “I find I need less sleep and my weary old bones don’t like staying still. So here I am.”

“To ride the sun across the sky?”

“Good heavens no. I’m no god—just an old man.” His eyes twinkle as he says it, as though enjoying some private joke. Ben narrows his eyes.

“An old man, with an eye for a lyre and knowledge of Helios’ horses.”

“You’re a mistrusting one,” the old man says.

“And what have you done to gain my trust? I’ve been misled before.” Led down the path to darkness with words sweeter than pomegranate seeds. Led here now, to wrestle with Helios’ fearsome stallions until they have pounded his body to a bleeding pulp and the guard in red drags him back down to Hades, still breathing to live the rest of his punishment. For somehow, he imagines the red guard will not let him know the sweet release of death. Snoke had been precise in wanting to keep him alive in the underworld. _My son of darkness…_

The old man doesn’t reply immediately. Instead, he hands the lyre back to Ben. “It needs new strings,” he says, and then, more carefully, “I can think of none finer than the fiery hair of the sun’s stallions. A godly gift you’d give to her.”

“Why does everyone want the horse’s tail hair? Are you as determined that I be killed as well.”

“How will she sing if you don’t return the lyre to her?” shrugs the old man. Ben frowns. He hadn’t told him that Rey was a woman.

“Who are you?” he asks the old man, whose smile somehow only grows more benign. There is something familiar in that smile, and Ben feels a flicker of hope in his chest.

In the stable behind him, Ben hears a horse whinny. Instinct turns him towards the sound, but whatever had distressed the resting horse does not appear.

When Ben turns to the old man, he is gone.

“Where did he go?” Ben growls to the guard. The guard says nothing.

Anger flows through him now. Did the old man think him a fool to have a trick played on him? Why was it that everyone he met seemed to play his life as a game? Everyone except Rey.

Rey who had not trusted that he was behind her.

He is tempted to break her lyre between his hands. He is tempted to shout and scream, because anger—anger is familiar, anger he has known more deeply than he has ever known peace.

He’d only ever known peace in her songs.

 _It needs new strings,_ the old man had said.

 _I need a new life,_ Ben thinks looking down at Rey’s lyre in his hands.

And he enters the stable.

-

Helios’ horses are fearsome things—taller than Ben, and heavier and glowing hot and bright in the darkness of the night. The moment that he approaches, one rears, and he knows that he was meant to die by their hooves, his body dragged back to the underworld in failure.

He looks about the stable for a brush—hoping perhaps to comb them, but the moment he approaches, the horses stamp at him angrily and he knows he shall make no progress.

Perhaps he would have ended up trampled, had he not spoken to the old man. Perhaps he would have hung his head and returned to Hades like a dog with his tail between his legs.

Instead, in his hands, he holds a lyre. He does not know how to play it, but he finds it does not matter.

They are angry creatures, as once he had been. Music from her lyre had robbed him of his anger—and a more welcome robbery he could never have imagined.

He sits at the edge of the stable, his eyes on the largest of the stallions, and closes his eyes for the briefest moment, remembers how brightly she had shone in the darkness. Then he begins to play.

-

He plays all through the night with fingers stumbling over the instrument.

He has not played in years, and perhaps the horses can tell, but after an hour they settle.

After two they are nearly asleep.

After three, Ben reaches for the brush and pulls it once through the first horse’s mane—then again, and then a third time. He has gathered more than enough hair to meet his end of the bargain.

Carefully, with trembling fingers, he restrings the lyre.

-

When he leaves the stable, he is free. He hands a single hair to the guard who disappears down the mountain.


	4. Chapter 4

It is not until Rey reaches the palace the next day that she realizes that her lyre, her beloved lyre, had fallen from her fingers in her despair. She had failed, she had lost, Ben was dead and the only songs ever sung of him would be songs of his villainy—how he deserved his fate in Hades, and in her numbness she had lost the only thing of value she’d ever had.

Rey lets her misery have her for three days. Her feet are sore from walking, her throat is too dry to sing, and her heart is bruised and battered from her own weakness. When she falls into sleep, her dreams are tormented, watching Ben fade into blackness, watching herself fail over and over and over again.

She rises before dawn on the fourth day, when the sky is lightening from deepest black to a deep blue, and nearly feels herself again.

She will not be defeated. She may not be a hero, may only ever sing of heroes, but she will not leave her lyre at the maw of the Underworld, to lose it there as well as Ben.

So she rouses herself, cloaks herself, and makes her way out of the palace towards the bend between the mountains, retracing her steps towards death, though she herself will not die.

The sun is making its way through the sky when she sees in the distance a man walking towards her. The road has been empty, and he looks as though he is wearing nothing but rags, his body the sort of hunger-thin that Rey is all too familiar with. She reaches for her belt where a little purse sits. It is mostly empty of coin, but what Rey has, she would give to him. She has a palace to return to, for the queen has not yet tired of her song, and will soon have her lyre again.

But as she nears him, she sees he is carrying a lyre too—made of a fine brown wood with strings of burning gold. The instrument is far too fine for such a ragged man.

The closer her gets, the taller he seems to grow. His shoulders are broad, his skin is pale, his hair is dark and—

She freezes.

She has seen his face fade into darkness so many times in the past few days, her mind unable to let the memory of him go. And now here he stands in broad daylight, carrying her lyre.

She breaks into a run and a moment later she has thrown herself into his arms. His heart is beating wildly in his chest and he is laughing and holding her and when she tries to pull away from him, to look up at him, his arms only tighten around her.

“I am sorry,” she pleads into his chest. She needs him to understand, needs him to know, needs him to forgive her own weakness because if he does, perhaps she can too. “I did not know if you had been allowed to follow me, and if I needed to go back, I had not yet left the Underworld.”

“Lesser fools have succumbed to his lies—and greater ones too.” His skin is sun-warmed and his voice is muffled in her hair and Rey trembles.

When he does let go of her, he is blushing. He hands her the gold-strung lyre and when she plucks a string, the note is so sweet that tears fill her eyes.

“Will you sing for me?” he asks, and his blush deepens. Rey nods, and they find a tree to sit under. The new strings no her lyre are thinner than the old, but somehow stronger. They are warm under her fingers and as she tunes and tightens, and when she opens her mouth to sing, her voice cracks and she stops, mortified.

Ben is lying in the grass next to her, watching her closely, and he sits up and presses his lips to the back of her hand. “Still the sweetest song I’ve heard,” he tells her.

“I’ve been unwell,” she confesses. More of heart and mind than of body, but unwell all the same. “Perhaps I cannot sing, but I can play.”

“Play, then,” he tells her. “Do as you will, just let me hear you.”

So she plays, her fingers dancing slowly over the strings. It is no song she’s ever played before—she writes it as she plays. A song for Ben, a song of life, and sunlight, and joy, and returning.

He runs his fingers along her leg and her fingers falter. He presses his lips to the seam of her knee and her heart begins to thud hard in her chest. And when he mouths his way up her thigh—his breath and lips so very warm—she almost stops playing.

“I want to hear you,” he whispers into her skin, looking up at her. “Please.”

So she keeps playing. It is an easier game to play than the bargain to bring him back—at least she thinks it is until her fingers tremble on her strings and her breath grows shaky because his lips are now closer and closer to the valley between her legs, and as he shifts her tunic aside and kisses her—

There’s no song in the world quite like the feeling of his lips against hers, of his breath against her sex. What can she play when there is music in the gentle lapping of his tongue against her flesh? Her head falls back and through the leaves overhead she can see the sun’s progress, a benediction of some sort on this moment of life, of love, of music. She keeps playing, though the music is tuneless now. There is no melody, or harmony, or rhythm, just her fingers finding her strings and plucking and she cannot sing along, but she does start to moan as the warmth that Ben is licking between her legs begins to match the warmth of the new strings of her lyre.

_Just let me hear you._

Does he smile into her sex as the moans rip out of her, as she lets him hear her? Does he notice when she stops playing, for she does not? The lyre has fallen onto the ground next to the tree, and Rey’s hands now weave through Ben’s hair, clinging to him, holding him there because her life depends on it, on him far more than she’d ever thought possible. And when the world grows too clear around her, when the pounding in her ears lessens and she starts to hear the songs of birds again, when Ben’s lips leave her cunt to kiss her thigh and his deep eyes peek up at her from between her legs, Rey understands the songs of gods and heroes in a way she’d never thought possible.

And when she takes him inside her, lies back against the grass with him and holds his beating heart between her hands, hums with joy in his ears as he loses himself to life, Rey thinks she knows what song she will write about him when they are done.

-

The queen hosts a feast for a full week when her son was returned to her. At the end of it, Rey and Ben quietly marry in the middle of a bright sunny day.

Rey had worried that only the most villainous songs would ever be sung of Ben—she had not thought of herself.

She is a singer, and should have known better.

People love songs of heroes who barge into death and make it out alive with their prize. Perhaps Ben had left his villainy behind in death—but Rey has always been the stuff of heroes.

**Author's Note:**

> Short little ending chapter. Thank you all for reading! I hope you enjoyed this! Come say hi on [tumblr](http://crossingwinter.tumblr.com/reylo) if you feel like chatting!


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